Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

Stephen R. C. Hicks’s Explaining Postmodernism:

Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault:

A Discussion

Steven M. Sanders

Bridgewater State College

1. Introduction

Readers of Stephen Hicks’s Explaining Postmodernism 1 will find

much to reflect upon and engage with in the pages of this lucid study of the

background, themes, and consequences of postmodernist thought and practice.

The book has already received lavish praise from Reason Papers founding

editor Tibor R. Machan and it is easy to see why. 2 With clarity, concision, and

an engaging style, Hicks exposes the historical roots and philosophical

assumptions of the postmodernist phenomenon. More than that, he raises key

questions about the legacy of postmodernism and its implications for our

intellectual attitudes and cultural life.

Explaining Postmodernism is broad in scope, moving with ease from

Rousseau and Kant to Derrida and Rorty. Hicks writes about modern

European philosophy and the Anglo-American tradition with sophistication

and an eye for the thought-revealing anecdote. In addition to tackling major

thinkers, including Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Hicks

gives us insightful glimpses into a number of second-tier figures who are still

less widely discussed than perhaps they should be. The book is studded with

clarifying distinctions and is written in a style that seamlessly integrates

primary material into the narrative, making explicit the common themes

underlying postmodernism in philosophy, politics, and the arts.

This is not a purely historical work. It is also a critique, and in many

places it is vigorously polemical. Hicks makes a commendable effort to

provide a balanced account of the philosophers he discusses, but his emphasis

is clearly on aspects of their thought of greatest relevance to the development

of postmodernism. In any case, it takes courage for a philosopher at an

American university to say some of the things Hicks says in this book. One

1 Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from

Rousseau to Foucault (Tempe, AZ: Scholarly Publishing, Inc., 2004).

2 Machan’s review is posted on the Amazon website.

need only note the fate of Lawrence Summers to see how very risky it can be

to transgress Left orthodoxy in the academy. As Steven Pinker reports, when

the president of Harvard University had the temerity to raise the question of

the possibility of innate sex differences at a conference on gender imbalances

in science, eminent MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins stormed out of the room to

avoid, she said, fainting or becoming physically ill—thereby, in the words of

Harvey Mansfield, conforming to the traditional stereotype of women as

“emotional” at the same time as she denounced it. 3 The National Organization

for Women called for Summers’s resignation and more than 100 Harvard

faculty members signed a letter criticizing him. In a follow-up story on the

controversy, Jason Zengerle makes it clear that left-leaning Harvard faculty

had other grievances against Summers, including his paean to patriotism a

month after the September 11th terrorist attacks, his decision to rescind a

Sixties-era policy prohibiting students from citing ROTC service in their

yearbook, his opposition to the campaign to force Harvard to divest its

portfolio of companies that do business in Israel, and his confrontation with

African-American studies professor Cornel West over the quality of West’s

scholarship, a confrontation widely reported at the time to have led West to

decamp to Princeton. 4 Summers’s mea culpas in the aftermath of the response

to his remarks were to no avail. At a meeting on March 15, 2005, the Harvard

Arts & Sciences faculty passed a resolution declaring a lack of confidence in

the president. With Summers's recent announcement of his resignation,

effective June 2006, it seems clear that faculty members hardly covered

themselves in glory, and Hicks's book helps us to understand why.

Hicks organizes his material with historical insight and analytical

finesse around a central thesis: “The failure of epistemology made

postmodernism possible, and the failure of socialism made postmodernism

necessary” (p. i, emphasis in text). The six chapters that make up Explaining

Postmodernism can be divided conveniently into two groups of three chapters,

each group pivoting on a hypothesis about postmodernism. The articulation

and defense of these hypotheses, together with a delineation of their

implications for philosophy, science, politics, ethics, education, and the arts is

the raison d’etre of Explaining Postmodernism and the basis of its

importance. In what follows I will discuss central themes in Hicks’s book

(without claiming to do justice to the vast range of topics it takes up): Kant

and postmodernist epistemology, postmodernist politics and the Left, and

3 Steven Pinker, “Sex Ed,” The New Republic, February 14, 2005, pp. 15-17; Harvey

Mansfield, “Fear and Intimidation at Harvard,” The Weekly Standard, March 7, 2005,

p. 10.

4 Jason Zengerle, “Harvard Coup,” The New Republic, March 7, 2005, pp. 11-14.

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postmodernist nihilism. First, however, let me say something about Hicks’s

view of postmodernism as a reaction to the Enlightenment project.

2. What Is Postmodernism?

The terms “postmodern,” “postmodernism,” and “postmodernist” are

associated with disciplines as different as literary criticism, architecture,

painting, and philosophy and have come into use in these disciplines at

different times and for different purposes. It is therefore a matter of some

dispute whether postmodernism is best described as an historical period

stretching from the 1960s to the present; a mosaic of moods, motifs, and

themes; a distinctive style, sensibility, or point of view; or all of these things.

Even when we confine our attention to the terms as they show up in

philosophical contexts, we find a multiplicity of uses. Philosophers have

characterized postmodernism as a set of theses, as a “condition,” in the words

of Jurgen Habermas, in which there is “a crisis of modernity,” and even as “an

activist strategy.” The great dangers, of course, are either to be so

overwhelmed by the many forms postmodernism has taken that one is unable

to offer a useful characterization at all or to make postmodernism appear more

monolithic than it is. Fortunately, Hicks has largely avoided these extremes.

Rather than try to settle controversies about its contested boundaries, he

proceeds with an account of postmodernism as a comprehensive intellectual

and cultural movement defined by certain fundamental metaphysical,

epistemological, and ethical premises that brought together intellectual

developments in the mid-twentieth century in many areas, including

philosophy, politics, and the physical sciences (p. 21). Postmodernism is anti-

realist in its metaphysics, for it denies that we can speak meaningfully of an

independently existing reality. It is relativist if not skeptical in its

epistemology, rejecting reason, or anything else, as a means of acquiring

objective knowledge. It is collectivist and social-constructivist in its accounts

of human nature, activist in its ethics and politics, and noisomely avant-

gardist in its aesthetics.

Any family of views calling itself post-modernist positions itself

historically and conceptually as a response to “modernism.” In philosophy,

the essential modernist figures are Bacon, Descartes, and Locke with their

philosophical naturalism, confidence in reason, and individualism (p. 7). In

Hicks’s view, “The battle between modernism and the philosophies that led to

postmodernism was joined at the height of the Enlightenment”—with its

innovation and progress in science and technology, its liberal politics, and its

free markets, which were all made possible by a confidence in the power of

reason (pp. 22-23). Hicks’s discussion of the epistemology and political

philosophy of these paradigms of modernism helps us to identify what

postmodernists see themselves as negating and transcending. Summarizing

this discussion, Hicks writes:

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Postmodernism rejects, or is deeply suspicious of, truth, objectivity, and

progress, and is characterized by a distinctive anti-science, anti-capitalist

mentality. Postmodernists are united by both a shared philosophical history

and a shared conception of human nature—or at least agreement about what

our “core feelings” are: “dread and guilt” (Kierkegaard and Heidegger);

“alienation, victimization, and rage” (Marx); “a deep need for power”

(Nietzsche); and “a dark and aggressive sexuality” (Freud). As Hicks

observes, postmodernists divide over the question whether these core feelings

are socially or biologically determined, but “in either case, individuals are not

in control of their feelings: their identities are a product of their group

memberships, whether economic, sexual, or racial,” and since these vary, with

no objective standards to which we can submit our alternative and conflicting

perspectives, “group balkanization and conflict must necessarily result” (p.

82).

As Hicks makes clear, far from emerging fully developed from the

work of a few Sixties-era French theorists, postmodernism has a distinguished

lineage that can be traced back to Kant, Rousseau, and Marx. Its influence has

been felt not only in philosophy, where its leading strategists include Michel

Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Richard Rorty, but also

in literary criticism and legal theory (Stanley Fish, Frank Lentricchia),

psychology (Jacques Lacan), philosophy of science (Paul Feyerabend, Luce

Irigaray), architecture (Charles Jencks, Robert Venturi, Michael Graves), and

literature and the arts (Thomas Pynchon, Laurie Andersen, Cindy Sherman,

Damien Hirst).

3. Kant and Postmodernist Epistemology

Hicks’s first hypothesis about postmodernism is:

Postmodernism is the first ruthlessly consistent statement of the

consequences of rejecting reason, those consequences being

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Postmodernism’s essentials are the opposite of modernism’s. Instead

of natural reality—anti-realism. Instead of experience and reason—

linguistic social subjectivism. Instead of individual identity and

autonomy—various race, sex, and class group-isms. Instead of

human interests as fundamentally harmonious and tending toward

mutually-beneficial interaction—conflict and oppression. Instead of

valuing individualism in values, markets, and politics—calls for

communalism, solidarity, and egalitarian restraints. Instead of prizing

the achievements of science and technology—suspicion tending

toward outright hostility. (pp. 14-15)

necessary given the history of epistemology since Kant. (p. 81,

emphasis in text)

To understand Kant’s significance as a precursor of postmodernism, Hicks

looks at Kant’s prominence on the broad horizon of the Enlightenment, whose

most influential thinkers were sustained by the rationalist hope that the use of

reason would be transformative of life. The advancement of science and the

growth of knowledge were to lead to progress, prosperity, and perfectibility.

Nowhere is this eighteenth-century optimism more dramatically shown to be

problematic than in the writings of Rousseau. Hostile to the very science with

which most of his contemporaries were infatuated, Rousseau challenged the

faith in this wonderful engine of progress in a “Counter-Enlightenment”

critique of reason that had an important influence on Kant (p. 24ff.). Not only

do we not need all that we can obtain by dint of our reason, but the

multiplication of wants in the wake of the application of our inventiveness

leaves us dissatisfied and dependent, at odds with ourselves and incapacitated

for living well. “As the conveniences of life increase and luxury spreads the

virtues disappear; and all this is an effect of the sciences and the arts.” Thus

was Rousseau intent on showing the problematic features of living with the

strategy of progress. 5 It is a measure of his importance that this attitude

remains with us today in that blend of influences from which postmodernism

derives its peculiar appeal: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

Kant’s is the paradigm case of rationalist epistemology, and its

failure is the basis of the subsequent rejection of reason typical of

postmodernist thinkers. Two of Kant’s key assumptions are that “the knowing

subject’s having an identity is an obstacle to cognition” (p. 37), and that

“abstractness, universality, and necessity have no legitimate basis in our

experiences” (p. 38). These assumptions mark Kant as “the decisive break

with the Enlightenment and the first major step toward postmodernism” (p.

39). Why is this? Because they amount to the idea that “reason is in principle

severed from reality” (p. 41). According to Hicks, Kant decisively rejected

objectivity. Once one thus separates reason from reality, “the rest is details—

details that are worked out over the next two centuries. By the time we get to

the postmodernist account, reason is seen not only as subjective, but also as

incompetent, highly contingent, relative, and collective” (p. 42).

Postmodernism, thus, is the result of this Counter-Enlightenment

assault on reason prefigured and brought to fruition preeminently in Kant’s

philosophy. Unlike those who take Kant to be a defender and advocate of

reason, Hicks maintains that, according to Kant, “Reality . . . is forever closed

5 For this line of development and the quotation from Rousseau, see the charming

essay by W. D. Falk, “The Age of Reason,” in his Ought, Reasons, and Morality

(Cornell University Press, 1986).

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off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own

subjective products” (p. 28). Moreover, Kant was convinced that “the failures

of empiricism and rationalism had shown that objectivity is impossible” (p.

30). But this means that, on Kantian grounds, “science is cut off from reality

itself” (p. 36). From Kant, then, we learn that “the mind is not a response

mechanism but a constitutive mechanism”; that “the mind—and not reality—

sets the terms for knowledge”; and that “reality conforms to reason, and not

vice versa” (p. 39).

In the history of philosophy, Kant marks a fundamental shift from

objectivity as the standard to subjectivity as the standard. . . .With

Kant, then, external reality thus drops almost totally out of the

picture, and we are trapped inescapably in subjectivity . . . . (pp. 39,

41)

“After Kant,” Hicks writes, “the story of philosophy is the story of

German philosophy” (p. 42). The gap opened up by Kant between subject and

object, reason and reality, was not to be closed, but rather “set the stage for

the reign of speculative metaphysics and epistemological irrationalism in the

nineteenth century” from Hegel to Nietzsche (p. 44). With Hegel, Nietzsche,

and Heidegger come the formative influences of such Continental

postmodernists as Foucault and Derrida, thinkers who gave expression to

irrationalism in the twentieth century: “an agreement with Kant that reason is

impotent to know reality; an agreement with Hegel that reality is deeply

conflictual and/or absurd; a conclusion that reason is therefore trumped by

claims based on feeling, instinct, or leaps of faith; and that the non-rational

and the irrational yield deep truths about reality” (p. 57).

Hicks’s view that Kant is the decisive forerunner of postmodernism’s

anti-realist, anti-reason posture may come as something of a surprise to those

who see Kant not as initiating “the reign of . . . epistemological irrationalism

in the nineteenth century” (p. 44), but rather as one who punctured the

pretensions of the “pure” use of reason if only to emphasize the possibility of

a universally valid rational method in philosophy. Moreover, it is a matter of

some dispute whether Hicks is correct in his account of Kant’s religious

motivation. He writes that Kant was so alarmed by “the beating that religion

had taken at the hands of the Enlightenment thinkers” that he resolved to put

reason “in its proper, subordinate, place” (p. 29). It is also open to dispute

whether Kant was a kind of Kierkegaardian fideist, as he sometimes appears

to be in these pages. Nevertheless, Hicks is clearly justified in calling into

question Kant’s notion of noumenal reality—an idea as decisive for Kant’s

philosophy as it is dubious. But I shall not take up these vexed questions of

Kant exegesis and interpretation because even if Hicks were mistaken here,

his account accurately reflects how Kant’s ideas have been taken by a great

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Here the curtain falls on what might be called Act One of Hicks’s

production, with Heidegger busily repudiating logic and reason, all the better

to exalt emotion and feelings; with Foucault “reducing knowledge to an

expression of social power”; with Derrida turning language via deconstruction

into “a vehicle of aesthetic play”; and with Rorty gleefully chronicling the

epistemological and metaphysical failures of the realist and objectivist

tradition (p. 81).

4. Postmodernist Politics and the Left

Act Two (chapters four, five, and six) connects epistemology to

politics, skepticism to socialism. Hicks observes that “Postmodernists are

monolithically Left-wing in their politics” (p. 84), and moreover that those

habits of reason, civility, tolerance, and fair play, so characteristic of “the

modernist package of principles,” have been “least practiced and even

denounced” among the far Left—“particularly among those postmodernists

most involved with the practical applications of postmodernist ideas or with

putting postmodernist ideas into actual practice in their classrooms and in

faculty meetings . . .” (p. 85). Given the absence of “a roughly random

distribution of commitments across the political spectrum,” it would seem that

epistemology alone is not sufficient to explain postmodernism.

Enter postmodern politics. In a lengthy chapter on “the climate of

collectivism,” Hicks argues that four of socialism’s major claims—that

capitalism is exploitative; that socialism, by contrast, is humane and peaceful;

that capitalism is less productive than socialism; and that socialist economies

will usher in a new era of prosperity—have been refuted both in theory and in

practice, throwing Left-socialist intellectuals into crisis (pp. 86-88). Hicks

provides helpful discussions of Rousseau’s collectivism and statism, Kant on

collectivism and war, Herder on multicultural relativism, Fichte on education

as socialization, Hegel on state-worship, and the rise of National Socialism.

The upshot of these developments is that “the National Socialists and the

collectivist Right were wiped out physically and discredited morally and

intellectually. The new battle lines were simplified and starkly clear: liberal

capitalism versus Left socialism” (p. 134). The stage is thus set for Hicks’s

discussion of Marx and the New Left, which picks up the threads of anti-

reason, non-rational commitment, impatience, demoralization, rage, and calls

for revolutionary violence (pp. 135-70).

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many thinkers, and that is what is central to his purpose. For he means to

sketch the historical background of philosophical and political ideas that

yielded up postmodernism, and the answer to that question is presumably

independent of the question whether everything in that background is itself

false.

The rise of Left terrorism in nations other than those controlled by

explicitly Marxist governments was a striking feature of the 1960’s

and early 1970’s. Combined with the broader turn of the Left to non-

rationalism, irrationalism, and physical activism, the terrorist

movement made that era the most confrontational and bloody in the

history of the Left socialist movements of those nations.

But the liberal capitalists were not entirely soft and

complacent, and by the mid-1970’s their police and military forces

had defeated the terrorists, killing some, imprisoning many, driving

others underground more or less permanently. (p. 170)

With the collapse of the New Left and the socialist movement generally, four

figures in the postmodernist movement came into prominence: Foucault,

Lyotard, Derrida, and Rorty.

Accordingly, it was these four academic foes of capitalism, whose tactics and

weapons were not those of the politician, activist, revolutionary, or terrorist,

“who signaled the new direction for the academic Left” (p. 172).

In order to explain the connection between postmodernist

epistemology and politics, it will be helpful to depart from Hicks’s narrative

long enough to matte in some context for postmodernist academic ideology

and to illustrate this here and in the next section, adding a few examples of my

own. Radical political trends in academic philosophy that emerged in the

1960s and 1970s did not wither away, but instead gathered force and continue

to have dramatic practical effects that are still very much in evidence on

campuses across the country. Thomas Kuhn’s insistence on the subjectivity of

scientific paradigms, Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism (“anything

goes”), and Rorty’s “philosophy as conversation” became rallying cries for a

full-dress relativism. At the same time, colleges and universities began a

regime of race and gender preferences in admissions and hiring under the

guise of “diversity” and “representativeness”—an evasive rhetoric designed to

cloak the diminished importance of intellectual mastery of a subject. Faculty

hiring decisions became increasingly constrained by statistical grids. Goals

and timetables (if not de facto quotas) became an indispensable part of the

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All four of these postmodernists were born within a seven-year span.

All were well trained in philosophy at the best schools. All entered

their academic careers in the 1950’s. All were strongly committed to

Left politics. All were well aware of the history of socialist theory

and practice. All lived through the crises of socialism of the 1950’s

and 1960’s. And come the end of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, all

four had high standing in the professional academic disciplines and

high standing among the intellectual Left. (p. 172)

selection process, and a cadre of compliance officers swelled the

administrative ranks as the great experiment became entrenched.

The problem is that once the university embraced the relativism of

political radicalism and the distributive criteria of affirmative action, it was

forced to accept the idea that everything is permitted. The distinction between

argument and propaganda, between carefully marshaled evidence and

inflammatory posturing was contested and finally abandoned. Now anything

was intellectually respectable as long as it was “conversation”—and what

could not be construed as conversation?—allowing all comers a place at the

table or in the seminar room. Of course, far from welcoming all views, the

academic Left had an agenda of intellectual and political orthodoxy as rigid

and authoritarian as the “canon” of the white heterosexual male hegemony it

so despised. One of the most inventive sections of the second half of Hicks’s

book is his discussion of the “Kierkegaardian,” “Reverse Thrasymachean,”

“Machiavellian,” and “Ressentiment” strategies postmodernist thinkers use to

connect their relativistic epistemology and dogmatic political commitments.

The first develops sophisticated epistemological strategies for attacking the

reason and logic which led to problems with the socialist vision of society (p.

180). The second involves marshaling subjectivist and relativist arguments to

support the postmodernist claim that justice is the interest of the weaker and

historically oppressed groups (p. 183). The third uses relativistic epistemology

as a rationalization or rhetorical political strategy to throw opponents off-track

(p. 186). I discuss the fourth strategy, “ressentiment” postmodernism, in

Section 5 below.

As the pendulum swung to the Left, the intellectual and cultural life

of the university became destabilized. Hicks does a good job of exposing the

irony of those who (as I would put it) insisted that you were not to

disassociate yourself from those to whom you felt no particular sympathy, but

who also insisted that you must disassociate yourself from those who offended

their sensitivities—the “dominant powers,” which meant the usual suspects:

the Department of Defense, the “oppressor state” of Israel, the business

community, the wealthy, recruiters associated with the military and the

intelligence community, conservative think tanks, and anyone else who went

against the grain of Left political engagement. Sometimes these strictures took

on a vaguely comic aspect. The author of a text I once assigned for an

undergraduate course in philosophy of mind insisted on putting ‘they’ and

‘their’ in place of singular impersonal pronouns because he regarded the use

of the masculine pronoun in impersonal contexts as “pernicious.”

Accordingly, he adopted the plural pronoun throughout his text even when

strict grammar required a singular. The habit of thought, you see, comes to be

as automatic as that, with no concern for the sweeping generalization, as if all

uses of the masculine pronoun in impersonal contexts were injurious and the

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simple expedient of alternating ‘he’ and ‘his’ with ‘she’ and ‘hers’ was not

available. 6

More often, however, the antagonisms were of vastly greater

consequence, and the second half of Hicks’s book, which deals with

postmodern political and educational strategies, amplifies and illustrates his

second hypothesis about postmodernism:

Postmodernism is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy

for responding to the failures of socialism in theory and in practice.

(p. 89, emphasis in text)

Why, then, has the Left—and, I should add, not just “a leading

segment of the political Left,” as Hicks puts it, but much of the intellectual

and cultural Left generally—“adopted skeptical and relativist epistemological

strategies” (p. 174)? Hicks’s answer is that if “postmodernism is born of the

marriage of Left politics and skeptical epistemology,” then we should not be

surprised to find that “confronted by the continued flourishing of capitalism

and the continued poverty and brutality of socialism,” Left thinkers of the

1950s and 1960s would “stick to their ideals and attack the whole idea that

evidence and logic matter” (p. 90).

5. Academic Noir: Postmodernist Nihilism

In a stunning final section, Hicks concedes that his explanations of

postmodernism’s relativism and subjectivism, its Left politics, and the

connection between them, do not come to grips with “a psychologically

darker streak” running through postmodernism. This requires an explanation

that goes beyond treating postmodernism as “a response to skepticism, a faith-

response to the crisis of a political vision, or as an unscrupulous political

strategy” (p. 191).

The situation is best illustrated in the context of recent academic

controversy. As the opportunities to hire new faculty waxed and waned, the

6 A more balanced attempt at “handling the issue of gender equity” is made by

Nicholas Rescher: “I propose to treat an otherwise undifferentiated someone as male,”

he writes, “but an otherwise unidentified person or agent or individual as female. …

And I shall try to employ these two sorts of locutions in roughly equal proportions.”

Nicholas Rescher, Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life (New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), p. 216 n. 9. But old stereotypes die hard, and despite

his genuine effort to “achieve fairness while nevertheless averting the barbarism of a

constantly repeated his or her” (ibid.), this does not prevent Rescher from referring to

the “confidence man” and “con man”—instead of the more neutral “con artist” or

“confidence trickster”—who dupes the unwary female out of her life savings (ibid., p.

28).

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university became the main repository of postmodernist influence, and the

alienated and disaffected, the irresponsible and preposterous, came and went,

affecting the thought and practice even of those who would not normally be

characterized as postmodernists themselves.

Let us consider some inconsistencies. Most academics believe, or

would say they believe, the theory of evolution, for by their own account they

are scientifically up-to-date. (Many are, for good measure, resolutely

irreligious.) But they distance themselves from the theory of evolution when

what is at issue is whether there is a biological basis for attitudinal or

behavioral differences between men and women, as Lawrence Summers

learned to his dismay. More tellingly, many in the academy believe that the

mass of people are prone to false consciousness, rationalization, wishful

thinking, and other cognitive disabilities that badly distort their politics and

their capacity for free choice in the marketplace, even as they repudiate the

very notions of truth and objectivity. A third case is that despite paying lip-

service to equality and diversity, many Leftists think nothing of invoking

cultural stereotypes to denigrate white Southern males generally, whom they

call “rednecks” and “cowboys.” Of course, the same people are censorious

when others fail to uphold the requisite gender, race, class, and sexual-

disposition sensitivities. Hicks provides additional examples of this pattern of

inconsistency: “all cultures are equally deserving of respect, but Western

culture is uniquely destructive and bad”; “values are subjective, but sexism

and racism are evil”; “technology is destructive and bad, and it is unfair that

some have more technology than others” (p. 184). Hicks also supplies

examples of contradictions between postmodernist theory and historical fact:

“the West is deeply racist”—but the West ended slavery, and only in places

where Western ideas are on the ascendancy are racist ideas in decline; “the

West is deeply sexist”—but women in the West were the first to get suffrage,

contractual rights, and opportunities that most women in the rest of the world

utterly lack; “Western capitalist countries are cruel to their poor”—but the

poor in the West are far better off than the poor anywhere else in the world (p.

185).

How are we to explain the postmodernist oscillation between

subjective relativism and dogmatic absolutism illustrated in these

inconsistencies (not to mention the contradictions between postmodernist

theory and fact)? As Hicks asks, is the relativism primary and the absolutist

politics secondary? Are the absolutist politics primary, advanced by the

rhetoric of relativism? In the end, Hicks suggests that “both the relativism and

the absolutism coexist in postmodernism, but the contradictions between them

simply do not matter psychologically to those who hold them . . . because for

them ultimately nothing matters” (pp. 186, 192, emphasis in original).

Nihilism, never refuted but subdued for so long that it was not

thought necessary to take it seriously, has returned with a vengeance and now

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has its defenders even among—especially among—academics. Hicks brings

Act Two to a striking climax with an apocalyptic revelation: postmodernism is

a nihilism.

Hicks supports this thesis with verve and imagination, quoting

postmodernists to convict them out of their own mouths. In a fitting irony, he

uses the nihilists’ own Saint Nietzsche against them, applying Nietzsche’s

concept of ressentiment as a diagnostic tool for explaining postmodernist

strategies. Nietzsche, of course, used ressentiment in his account of master

and slave morality. It is worth quoting Hicks at length:

Slave morality is the morality of the weak . . . . Weaklings are

chronically passive, mostly because they are afraid of the strong. As

a result, they cannot get what they want out of life. They become

envious of the strong, and they also secretly start to hate themselves

for being so cowardly and weak. But no one can live thinking he or

she is hateful. And so the weak invent a rationalization—a

rationalization that tells them they are the good and the moral

because they are weak, humble, and passive. . . . And, of course, the

opposites of those things are evil—aggressiveness is evil, and so is

pride, and so is independence, and so is being physically and

materially successful. (p. 193)

Hicks makes it clear that Leftist acrimony is a deeply burnished feature of the

postmodernist armory. “In the modern world,” he writes, “Left-wing thought

has been one of the breeding grounds for destruction and nihilism” (p. 192).

Its rage is barely concealed, aesthetically as well as politically, which is why

when Hicks comes to central themes in twentieth-century art, he writes

(alluding to the motto of the Dada movement, “Art is shit”) that

“postmodernism is a generalization on Dada’s nihilism. Not only is art shit,

everything is” (p. 197).

The thesis that postmodernism engaged and succumbed to nihilism is

illustrated in Hicks’s discussion of Marcel Duchamp’s version of the Mona

Lisa, with the cartoonish moustache added by Duchamp, and Robert

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In our time, “Socialism is the historical loser,” and socialists “will hate that

fact, they will hate the winners for having won, and they will hate themselves

for having picked the losing side. Hate as a chronic condition leads to the urge

to destroy” (p. 194). But they will not limit their rage to political failure:

Postmodern thinkers hold that not just politics has failed—everything

has failed. Being, as Hegel and Heidegger taught us, really has come

to nothing. Postmodernism, then, in its most extreme forms, is about

driving that point home and making nothing reign. (p. 194)

Rauschenberg, who “took Duchamp a step further. Feeling that he was

standing in the shadow of Willem de Kooning’s achievements, he asked for

one of de Kooning’s paintings—which he then obliterated and then painted

over” (pp. 198-99). Hicks says that these works made the statements “Here is

a magnificent achievement that I cannot hope to equal, so that instead I will

deface it and turn it into a joke” and “I cannot be special unless I destroy your

achievement first,” respectively (pp. 198-99). No wonder deconstruction—the

“literary version of Duchamp and Rauschenberg” (p. 199)—is “arrayed

primarily against works that do not square with postmodern commitments” (p.

199).

Deconstruction has the effect of leveling all meaning and value. If a

text can mean anything, then it means nothing more than anything

else—no texts are then great. If a text is a cover for something

fraudulent, then doubt about everything apparently great creeps in.

(p. 199)

Hicks’s analysis at this point has an edgy ingenuity to it, seeing the

hostage art gives to nihilism as symptomatic of the twentieth century’s

characteristic malaise, with all of the postmodernist pathologies it reflects. To

be sure, some minor inaccuracies have found their way into his account of

Rauschenberg, who completely erased (not painted over) a drawing (not a

painting) given to him by de Kooning (who was involved in the project from

the start, even if only reluctantly), for the express purpose of determining

“whether a drawing could be . . . created by the technique of erasing.”

Rauschenberg tells us he spent a month, and forty erasers, trying to do just

that. He then framed, dated, and gave the item the title Erased de Kooning

Drawing and exhibited the erasure as his own work of art. 7 In this respect, the

enterprise may be thought to bear a family resemblance to 4’33”—the

notorious piano piece by the composer John Cage, which consists of a pianist

sitting at a keyboard for exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds without playing a

note. In both cases it is arguable that we do not have an art work here at all, to

say nothing of one which sends a message of nihilism. But perhaps Hicks only

means that the antics involved in the process of erasing the de Kooning

drawing (or, in the cases of Duchamp and Cage, the act of painting a

moustache on the Mona Lisa or sitting at a piano keyboard in silence) together

with the chutzpah of putting it forward as an artwork of one’s own, is the

vehicle of the nihilistic message.

7 See Rauschenberg’s account, from which I have quoted, in Anecdotes of Modern Art,

ed. Donald Hall and Pat Corrington Wykes (New York: Oxford University Press,

1990), pp. 347-48. Of course, one may not wish to credit Rauschenberg’s account of

his own intentions.

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In any case, I take it that Hicks’s remarks in this context are further

illustrations of postmodernism’s descent into nihilism:

To the postmodern mind, the cruel lessons of the modern world are

that reality is inaccessible, that nothing can be known, that human

potential is nothing, and that ethical and political ideals have come to

nothing. The psychological response to the loss of everything is

anger and despair. (p. 198)

So goes Hicks’s diagnosis of postmodernist nihilism’s attack on “the

Enlightenment’s sense of its own moral worth”:

Attack it as sexist and racist, intolerantly dogmatic, and cruelly

exploitative. Undermine its confidence in its reason, its science and

technology. The words do not even have to be true or consistent to

do the necessary damage. (p. 200)

Of course, as Hicks acknowledges, identifying the roots of

postmodernism and linking them to contemporary nihilism does not refute the

doctrine. As the curtain comes down on page 201, one waits in vain for Act

Three. Hicks knows he has an unfinished agenda “essential to maintaining the

forward progress of the Enlightenment vision and shielding it against

postmodern strategies,” namely, a refutation of postmodernism’s historical

premises as they are found in Rousseau, Kant, and Marx and an articulation

and defense of the main alternatives to them (p. 201). Let us hope that

Stephen Hicks will apply the historical understanding, analytical insight, and

argumentative skills so much in evidence in Explaining Postmodernism to

complete the work that remains to be done.

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